e like
testimonials and denunciations, especially the latter, from writers of
the early decades of the seventeenth century. Perhaps the most curious
thing in connexion with the immense number of allusions to smoking in
the literature of the period is that there is no mention whatever of
tobacco or smoking in the plays of William Shakespeare. As Edmund
Spenser, in the "Faerie Queene," speaks of

_The soveraine weede, divine tobacco_,

it may be presumed that he was a smoker.

IV

CAVALIER AND ROUNDHEAD SMOKERS

"A custom lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose,
harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs, and in the
blacke stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the
horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is
bottomelesse."--JAMES I, _A Counterblaste to Tobacco._

The social history of smoking from the point of view of fashion,
during the period covered by this and the next two chapters may be
summarized in a sentence. Through the middle of the seventeenth
century smoking maintained its hold upon all classes of society, but
in the later decades there are distinct signs that the habit was
becoming less universal; and it seems pretty clear that by the time of
Queen Anne, smoking, though still extensively practised in many
classes of society, was to a considerable extent out of vogue among
those most amenable to the dictates of Fashion.

It is certain that the armies of the Parliament were great smokers,
for the finds of seventeenth-century pipes on the sites of their camps
have been numerous. A considerable number of pipes of the Caroline
period, with the usual small elongated bowls, were found in 1902 at
Chichester, in the course of excavating the foundations of the Old
Swan Inn, East Street, for building the present branch of the London
and County Bank.

We know also that the Roundhead soldiers smoked in circumstances that
did them no credit. In the account of the trial of Charles I, written
by Dr. George Bates, principal physician to his Majesty, and to
Charles II also, we read that when the sentence of the Court presided
over by Bradshaw, condemning the King "to death by severing his Head
from his Body," had been read, the soldiers treated the fallen monarch
with great indignity and barbarity. They spat on his clothes as he
passed by, and even in his face; and they "blew the smoak of Tobacco,
a thing which they knew his Majesty hated, in his sacred mouth,
throwin